Professor Aaron McKindy
November 17, 2010 9:35 AM
Charms 1&2: Who Are You? by Professor Aaron McKindy
The thing Professor Aaron McKindy missed most about his original home in upstate New York was the drizzly January days, when the weather hadn’t quite decided to snow but hadn’t quite decided to rain either. The climates of Arizona and Colorado didn’t really lend themselves to too many drizzly days, days when you could just curl up with a good book or some homework (not that he had that anymore, of course), which Aaron felt was a huge loss to the inhabitants of the state. It hadn’t taken much to Charm windows into his office and quarters that reflected the current weather in upstate New York, though, and when Aaron had woken up that morning it had been the sort of drizzly January day he loved. On the other hand, when he stepped out of his office and into the real world, he was forced to come to grips with the fact that today was, as usual, one of the ‘sunny Arizona’ variety.Still, he had a class to teach, which was why he headed into his classroom anyway. The real bummer was that the activity he had planned for his first and second years today was definitely a rainy day sort of activity. After a few minutes of set-up in his classroom, the black-haired Italian checked his watch. He still had an hour before the kids would arrive. It might be pushing it, but--
When the first students for his Beginners class began to arrive, Aaron was deeply focused on a medium-sized window that had appeared over the bookshelves at the back of the room. No more than five minutes after the first kids had arrived, the window was portraying a steady drizzle of rain outside of it. The man smiled at his work and put his tophat made of pink bubbles back on top of his head, then strolled to the front of the classroom, stopping to chat with students on the way. His first years had come a long way and seemed to be more-or-less comfortable in class now. The second years, of course, knew that Charms had a relaxed environment. Not that Aaron made it an easy class; he just enjoyed what he did and loved to share that with his students.
Since about mid-October, the Beginner class had been learning different types of movement charms. They had worked on object moving for practical purposes (mobile levitation and the levi- group of spells) and object moving for not-so practical purposes (with Aaron’s patented ‘sugar cookie’ lesson, in which the students baked cookies and then Charmed them to do things like wink). Today, they were going to focus on making two-dimensional objects move. It was a bit of a tougher lesson and Aaron knew of a few who might have problems with it, but he hoped that it would be a fun one nevertheless.
Hands deep in the pockets of his Muggle blue-jeans, a t-shirt with a Hungarian Horntail on it—a gift from Jessie, his eighteen-year-old biological daughter who was currently studying at Colorado University Boulder Campus to become a Muggle vet despite the six years she spent at Hogwarts before dropping out—Aaron leaned against his desk and waited for the class to settle down. Once they had, he began.
“Good morning guys,” he said with a friendly smile, grey-green eyes sweeping the room. At the back, atop the bookshelves and under the new window, were stacks of Muggle magazines of every sort imaginable. Jessie had helped him gather those. Despite his time spent living as a Muggle, Aaron was still a little bit uncomfortable with many Muggle things. He could function, but anything too complicated like magazine subscriptions and he just got confused.
“Today we’re going to work on animating two-dimensional things. I know it seems like that would be easier than the three-dimensional animations you’ve been doing for the past month, but I’ve found that it’s actually a little bit more difficult. Does anyone remember how we did mobile levitation?” A few hands went up, and Aaron called on one of the students. They gave the correct answer—something about the levi- family of spells—and Aaron gave them a thumbs-up. He had a smart group of kids here. They usually caught on pretty quick.
“Right. Well today we’re going to work with another family of spells, called the lapsi family. It works the same way as the levi group except that instead of mobile levitation, it makes the thing in question move slowly in an action that would be natural to it in life. There are ways to determine what it does, but that’s more advanced so for now we’re not going to touch on it. So for example, if you took a photo of a cat,” Aaron held up a large photo of the family cat, Godric, who seemed to have taken up following Melody around as opposed to attacking the ankles of people around the house, something everyone was thankful for, “and enchant it--Lapsicattus--then it should—there we go,” the photo-Godric slowly looked at the class disdainfully and began to lick a paw.
“So that’s what we’re doing today. But to make it a bit more fun, I want you guys to make collages about yourselves. What you like, the things that make you you. There are a bunch of Muggle magazines in the back and some wizarding magazines over on that side table. The wizarding magazines don’t already have moving pictures in them,” it had been hard to hunt those down; moving pictures had been all the rage since that developing potion had been discovered in the ‘20s that made two-dimensional movement much more durable than the charms his kids were learning today, “so don’t worry about that. There’re scissors and paste on both tables and poster paper should be under each of your desks. On your collages, there should be at least five pictures that move. You’ll have two class periods to finish this so don’t worry about time today, but when you guys are done, I want to hang them up in the hallway,” Aaron smiled at the group. He was really excited for this project.
“Anyway, go ahead and get started! Just raise your hand if you need any help,” the dark-haired man said. The class began to move around, getting ready to start their collages, and he smiled. He loved his Beginner class.
|OOC|
Minimum ten sentences, please! But the more you do, the more House Points your House gets. Be creative and have fun! Tag me in your subject line if your character needs Aaron.
Subthreads: I think therefore I am by Samantha Hamilton with Marcus Williams (Pecari), Samantha
You're my teacher - you should know who I am. by James Owen with Kate Bauer, Teppenpaw, James
Someone who doesn't want to do this. by Autumn Collins, Crotalus with Sam Bauer, Crotalus
I don't know! by Ryan O'Malley, Crotalus with Sophie Jamison [Pecari]
I'm Kirstenna by Kirstenna Melcher,Teppenpaw
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Professor Aaron McKindy
Charms 1&2: Who Are You?
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Professor Aaron McKindy
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James Owen
November 19, 2010 2:21 PM
You're my teacher - you should know who I am. by James Owen
The Charms professor had purposefully enchanted his windows to make it look like it was raining. Why would anyone do that? James hated the rain with a passion. It ruined everything. The rain destroyed sandcastles, washed away street paintings, turned fields into mud, and made his hair stick to his head. It was wet, it was usually cold, and it made puddles under the door in the Owen household. At least this rain was outside, and James was safe, warm and dry in the classroom. All was as it should be. Yet he still felt discomfitted, so James took care to lay all the materials that might be necessary for the class - such as textbook, parchment, quill, ink, his wand, etc - out on the desk in front of him in perfectly straight lines. That made him feel better.The class was about moving 2D objects. James wondered at first why anyone would want to bother, but some thoughts came to him. Explaining by pictures would be easier if they moved, and he could make up some really fun puzzles using this spell. Okay, he would enjoy this lesson, the Aladren decided. For his poster, James wanted a picture of himself in the middle. So before he looked for a magazine, he took a sheet of his own parchment and started to draw. he had blue eyes, a sort of lumpy nose, and brown hair that always seemed too long. He'd tried having it cut really short but he'd hated how it looked on him. So too-long hair it was. It covered the scar on the back of his neck, at least, which was about the only good thing about it.
James was making a decent attempt at his self portrait, even though he was no artists it at least resembled the first year, when someone very unhelpfully bumped into his desk and made him blot his ink. That was immensly frustrating. "You could try being more careful," James said, sounding rude to hide his upset.
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James Owen
You're my teacher - you should know who I am.
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James Owen
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Kate Bauer, Teppenpaw
November 24, 2010 11:29 PM
Can anyone ever really know anyone else? by Kate Bauer, Teppenpaw
Attention to detail wasn't really her thing, so Kate didn't notice the addition to the room until she turned around in her desk to see if her roommates had arrived yet and noticed the weird light pattern on the desk next to hers. When she looked up and found the source, she wasn't sure if she should be slightly depressed by the gray or just plain impressed. She didn't see rain often - it was one of those things that went with living in California and Arizona - but that looked like it. Very similar to that day they'd spent at Granddad's last year, only without the miserable humidity that followed rain in most seasons of South Carolina.Kate really could not see how anyone could ever voluntarily live in the south. Even when the weather wasn't out for blood - which, apparently, it maybe wasn't in parts of late fall and winter - the socialites always were. She had only thought she understood snotty, classist people; listening to Granddad and Momma talk local politics for half an hour had let her know she knew basically nothing about the system. What was the point of having two families fight, originally with actual violence and these days by using pretty girls as weapons, from colonial times to the present? The original dudes were, like, dead.
Or maybe they weren't. She wasn't any good at history, but from what she'd picked up from the tutor, a lot of those old east coast families had apparently been into alchemy and stuff. Maybe those crazy old people were still the same ones that had been around in the 1740s, faking their deaths every few years and then assuming their "children's" identities, using spells and potions to control their visible age....
Yeah, that was morbid, especially since they'd have to kill off the original kids. She wasn't going to think about that anymore.
The assignment for the day was a lot less disturbing; in fact, it actually sounded like fun. The issue was whether or not her spellwork was up to the challenge. Kate decided to assume that she'd get some credit just for making the collage and worry about the magic later. Most spells they learned now weren't supposed to last for very long, anyway, so if she could just get it to work for a few seconds, she'd probably make a pass on that and just get instructions to work more on it in her own time.
She was on her way to get some magazines to look through when she saw a bag just before she would have snagged her sneaker in a shoulder strap and stopped abruptly to avoid it. Unfortunately, her feet caught up with each other at just the wrong angle and she stumbled into a desk. She opened her mouth to apologize, but before she could, the desk's occupant - James the Aladren, she thought, from her year - snapped at her.
"Wow, sorry," she said, flushing bright red. How, exactly, had her pale-skinned grandfather's genes managed to survive living in the south? It was hot. That meant lots of sun. That meant only people who didn't have pale brown hair, light eyes, and skin that looked like an English stereotype should have flourished well enough there to pass on their genes well enough for them to be strong enough to somehow override her dark-haired, dark-eyed father's two times out of three. "I was trying not to trip over this bag, and then my feet got all tangled up, and I kind of - yeah, you don't care. Do you, um, want a new piece of paper or something? My mom knows this spell to get rid of ink, but I don't, and I don't think I could do it yet without setting the fire on paper - I mean paper on fire - anyway."
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Kate Bauer, Teppenpaw
Can anyone ever really know anyone else?
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Kate Bauer, Teppenpaw
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James
December 02, 2010 9:12 AM
Can you ever really know yourself? by James
The girl apologized and flushed bright red. James was torn between feeling vindicated that she at least felt embarrassed for ruining his work, and somewhat embarrassed himself that he'd been rude to her. As she continued to apologize James felt his iritation and amusement grow in equal measures. He'd never really had a strong distinction between emotions, and right now he was as likely to shout and scream at this girl as he was to laugh at her. Finally she said something about setting fire on paper, and his amusement won over. James laughed."It's okay," he told the girl, whose name he didn't know; James didn't pay enough attention to other people to know who they were. "Did you hurt yourself?" She didn't look hurt but if she'd tripped she might have twisted her ankle or something.
"Don't worry about my picture," James said, looking down at his ruined portrait and frowning. It hadn't been that good, anyway. he'd never been able to draw. he could get the picture right in his head but he couldn't make his hand get it right on the paper. "I'll stick a picture over the blotted part or something." The Aladren hadn't given any thought to what sort of pictures he would put on his collage. They needed to be things that he could make move to satisfy the point of the class. He hadn't got any ideas yet, mostly because he wasn't sure what his hobbies were. He liked reading, but that wouldn't make a good movement. He liked playing with his sisters - treasure hunts, making dens, racing in the garden, trying to chase gnomes or catch chickens - that sort of thing. He did not like swimming.
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James
Can you ever really know yourself?
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James
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Kate
December 13, 2010 11:30 PM
People who can are probably rare. by Kate
If James the Aladren The Second – as opposed to the other James the Aladren, who Kate only knew of because he was a prefect and his name had been announced just after her Sorting, making the two events very linked together in her mind – was actually mad at her, he was at least nice enough to lie about it. She could deal with that.“Oh, yeah, I’m fine,” she said. “I don’t get hurt very easily.” Which was good, considering the amount of damage she’d always had a way of taking pre-Jeremy. There weren’t a lot of things she hadn’t, at one point or another, fallen off of, jumped off of, run into, had hit at her during the back yard melees her family had enjoyed and which had at one point or another been variant Quodpot before Rachel got the bright idea to introduce Bludgers and take it completely off the rails, or otherwise had an encounter with. Her dad had sometimes referred to her as Piñata.
“I really am sorry about it, though,” she added, looking back down at the disrupted image of her classmate. It hadn’t been all that bad – better than she could have done, anyway. She wasn’t a very good artist. At all. “Your picture, not me tripping. I’m sorry about that, too, but not as much.” She was rambling. It had nothing to do with him, being, along with occasionally unusual word order and making words up when she couldn’t think of one that fit, more a quirk of her speech. Her family called it Katespeak, and her mom in particular had gone out of her way to make sure that Alicia had not picked it up from her as she was learning to talk. “I don’t think we’ve ever introduced ourselves before. I’m Kate.” She extended her hand to shake his. “Kate Bauer.”
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Kate
People who can are probably rare.
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Kate
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James
December 27, 2010 4:45 PM
You're a poet and you didn't know it by James
James looked at the girl as she went on and on. he'd never met anyone who talked this much. His sisters talked a lot to each other, and could be giggly and annoying, but their conversation was usually two-way. This girl, wow, she just didn't stop. She wasn't even saying anything new - she was still apologising even though James had said it was okay about his picture. Repeatedly.Finally the rambling came to a conclusion as she introduced herself as Kate Bauer. She wanted to shake his hand. james didn't like to touch other people. He looked at her hand for a couple of seconds, contemplating it. eventually he decided he could just wash his hand thoroughly after the class, which would be necessary if he touched old magazines anyway. he took her hand and shook it briefly. "I'm James Owen," he returned the introduction, discreetly wiping his hand on his robes underneath the desk.
"My picture is fine," he reiterated. "And you talk a lot." Despite the cheerful laughter of moments ago, his irritation still seemed to be bubbling just below the surface. The rain outside wasn't helping to improve his mood. "I mean, you talk more than anyone else I've ever met," he told her.
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James
You're a poet and you didn't know it
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James
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